Firebird Rises Again

The Mozilla Foundation has cranked out new versions of three major apps today. The Mozilla Suite goes to 1.5, with enhancements to Composer, a new spellchecker, and stability enhancements.

The world’s greatest browser (if you ask me), FireBird, goes to version 0.7 and gets enhanced preferences, alternate stylesheets features, and the ability to load HTML in the sidebar.

My favorite e-mail client, Thunderbird, goes to version 0.3 with enhanced IMAP support, some great new POP options, and better attachment handling.

Don’t let the 0.7 and 0.3 version numbers on Firebird and Thunderbird fool you – these products branched from VERY mature Mozilla code and are exceptionally stable. I’ve been using them for months and I have far fewer crashes with Thunderbird and Firebird than I ever did with Outlook and IE (but that’s not saying much).

Deane Barker is a Founder and Consulting Analyst at Blend Interactive. Blend, located in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, helps institutions and agencies tackle complicated web and content problems.

Looking for a clear, unbiased view of web content management?Web Content Management: Systems, Features, and Best Practices explores the systems, technologies, and platforms within web content management, giving you the knowledge you need to solve the right problems.

Comments

Firebird is fantastic, but I don’t think Thunderbird is quite mature enough yet. I get random errors with it, sometimes it just doesn’t do things (I mark a nunch of messages as junk, and it moves some of them to the Junk folder, but not others) and this “Adaptive Junk Filtering” (a Bayesian-type spam filter) is still a ways off — it just doesn’t learn very quickly.

I’ll install 0.3, but 0.2 hasn’t quite done it for me. Firebird, however, I can recommend without reservation — great, great browser.

It used to be that as a web developer, I coded all my pages to work in IE, then had to tweak it to be able to ‘get by’ in everything else (mostly Netscape 4.x)

These days I code everything to work in Mozilla/Firebird/Camino/etc (the Gecko browsers), and then I have to tweak it to work in IE. Mozilla has shed light on a lot of things that didn’t work right in IE. With a total lack of innovation, Microsoft is being left in the dust in terms of browser innovation.

It used to be that as a web developer, I coded all my pages to work in IE, then had to tweak it to be able to ‘get by’ in everything else (mostly Netscape 4.x)

These days I code everything to work in Mozilla/Firebird/Camino/etc (the Gecko browsers), and then I have to tweak it to work in IE. Mozilla has shed light on a lot of things that didn’t work right in IE. With a total lack of innovation, Microsoft is being left in the dust in terms of browser innovation.